Comprehensive toolkit for enterprise system administrators
Infrastructure Management Suite
Ansible: Configuration Without the Drama There’s something oddly satisfying about logging into a fresh machine, typing one command — and watching it shape itself into exactly what’s needed. That’s the promise Ansible delivers on. No agents. No daemons. No special ports or heavy clients. Just SSH and YAML.
At its heart, Ansible is about making change predictable — on one host, or a thousand. And it does that without introducing its own layers of complexity. The playbooks are plain text. The inve
AutoHotkey: Automate the Tedious, One Script at a Time In a Windows environment, there’s no shortage of tasks that waste time — repetitive keystrokes, clicks buried under menus, and tiny inefficiencies that add up across hundreds of endpoints. AutoHotkey turns that friction into fluidity. It’s a lightweight scripting engine for automating virtually anything on a Windows desktop — keyboard shortcuts, UI interactions, file operations, even GUI apps of your own.
It’s not flashy. It doesn’t come wi
Rundeck CE: Turn Scripts into Self-Serve Operations In many teams, there’s this quiet pain point: scripts live in random folders, only a few people know how they work, and if someone’s off for the day — everything stalls. That’s where Rundeck Community Edition makes a difference.
It’s not here to replace existing tools. No, what Rundeck does is wrap them. Whether it’s a bash script, an Ansible playbook, or some Python routine — it gives them a web UI, a log viewer, an access policy, and a sched
GitHub Actions: Automation That Just Happens to Be There Sometimes, the best tools aren’t the ones screaming for attention. They’re the ones quietly sitting there, doing the job — no drama, no server to feed, no Jenkins to update. That’s the thing with GitHub Actions. It’s already in the repo. No setup wizard. No “connect your webhook” dance. You commit a YAML file and — boom — automation.
It feels like someone finally said: “Why can’t CI just live where the code lives?”
And that’s exactly wha
Kopia: Backups Without Noise, Lock-in, or Fuss Sometimes a tool just feels… solid. Not overengineered, not half-baked — just something that quietly works and doesn’t ask for much. That’s pretty much the vibe with Kopia.
It doesn’t come with flashy dashboards or marketing buzz. What it does offer is fast, encrypted, deduplicated backups — to local drives, SFTP, object storage, whatever. One binary. Cross-platform. No root. No agents. Just backups that behave.
You point it at a folder, it figu
Vorta + Borg: Bulletproof Backups With a Human Face Sometimes a tool does one thing really well — but the interface leaves people cold. Other times, the UI is great, but the engine underneath is shaky. The combo of BorgBackup and Vorta nails both: Borg brings power and security, and Vorta makes it usable for real humans.
On their own, they’re each useful. Together? They turn encrypted, deduplicated, versioned backups into a workflow that anyone — from Linux pros to casual laptop users — can tru
UrBackup: Image and File Backups That Just Quietly Work Backups don’t need to be complicated. They need to happen — regularly, silently, and in a way that makes recovery feel boring instead of terrifying. That’s where UrBackup comes in.
It’s not trying to reinvent the wheel. It’s just a backup system that actually backs things up. Files, full disk images, Windows and Linux machines, over the LAN or the internet — all from a central interface. No cloud lock-in, no mystery daemons.
What sets it
Restic: Fast, Encrypted Backups Without the Baggage Backups often start simple… until they don’t. A few scripts here, a cron job there — and suddenly there’s no encryption, no deduplication, and recovery feels like guesswork. Restic was built to fix exactly that — without adding a bunch of complexity in the process.
It’s a command-line backup tool, written in Go, designed to be fast, safe, and forgettable (in the best way). It encrypts by default, deduplicates out of the box, and runs anywhere
Zimbra OSE: When You Need Email Hosting That Feels Enterprise — Without the Bill Setting up a mail server is easy — until users start asking for webmail, calendars, shared folders, mobile sync, admin tools, and group management. Suddenly you’re in “groupware” territory, and plain Postfix + Dovecot won’t cut it.
That’s where Zimbra OSE comes into play. The open-source edition of Zimbra is like getting 70% of an enterprise mail platform — for free. It handles mail, contacts, calendars, file shari
Nextcloud: Private Cloud Without the Vendor Strings Attached There comes a point where shared folders, public clouds, and half-baked sync tools just don’t cut it anymore. Maybe it’s about control. Maybe it’s about trust. Or maybe it’s just about knowing exactly where files go and who can see them.
That’s where Nextcloud fits in. It’s a full-featured, self-hosted cloud platform — for files, calendars, contacts, chat, and more. You run it where you want, control the storage, users, apps, and upda
RainLoop: Lightweight Webmail That Doesn’t Feel Like a Relic There’s something refreshing about RainLoop. It’s not trying to be a collaboration suite. It’s not trying to replace Gmail. It just gives users a clean, fast webmail interface — with zero database dependencies and minimal setup.
Compared to heavier options like Roundcube, RainLoop feels snappier out of the box. The UI is more modern, with responsive design and fewer reloads. And even though it’s lightweight, it still checks the boxes:
Roundcube: Good Old Webmail That Just Works If you’ve ever run your own mail server, chances are you’ve bumped into Roundcube — maybe even used it without thinking much about it. It’s not shiny, not packed with bells and whistles, but it gets the job done. Clean UI, decent speed, runs on most LAMP stacks, and doesn’t need 500MB of JavaScript to render an inbox.
And really — that’s the charm.
Roundcube gives people a way to check their mail from a browser, without handing it off to Google or Mi
WinSCP: The Classic SFTP Client That Still Delivers Sometimes the best tools are the ones you install once and never need to explain. WinSCP is like that. It’s been quietly doing its job for years — transferring files over SFTP, SCP, FTP, WebDAV — with a clean interface and just enough options to make it powerful, without getting in the way.
It doesn’t try to be a full IDE. It’s not a shell replacement. It’s a file transfer tool. A really, really solid one. Why It Still Stands Out
Far Manager: The Terminal File Manager That Refuses to Die Some tools stick around not because they’re flashy — but because they work. Far Manager is one of those. It’s not modern. It doesn’t pretend to be. But for those who live in the terminal, it’s oddly perfect.
Launched back in the DOS era and still maintained today, Far is a text-based file manager for Windows that runs inside the console — full keyboard control, plugins galore, and more power than you’d expect from a “blue-screen two-pan
Double Commander: Two Panels, Zero Fuss, Full Control Sometimes all you want is a file manager that doesn’t get in your way. No animations, no file previews you didn’t ask for, no cloud pop-ups. Just two panes, keyboard shortcuts, and everything where it should be.
Double Commander is exactly that. Inspired by Total Commander, built as open-source, and available across platforms — it’s a cross-platform dual-pane file manager that feels instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever used NC-style tools
Altap Salamander: For When File Managers Actually Need to Work Most people never switch from Windows Explorer — until one day it chokes copying a folder with 3,000 files to a network share, and something just snaps. You start looking for tools that actually work.
Altap Salamander isn’t modern. It’s not pretty. It’s also not trying to be either. What it is — is fast, stable, and built for people who know what they’re doing. Dual-pane, hotkey-driven, and no fluff. It doesn’t nag. It doesn’t blink
Zabbix: The All-in-One Monitoring Giant You Either Love or Outgrow Slowly Zabbix is that one name that comes up in nearly every IT monitoring conversation. It’s open-source, feature-packed, ridiculously flexible — and also known for being slightly… well, unforgiving. But when it works, it works well.
It covers hosts, services, applications, networks, custom metrics, SNMP devices — all from a single central platform. You get graphing, alerting, templating, auto-discovery, dashboards, dependenc
Checkmk Raw Edition: Serious Monitoring Without a SaaS Bill There’s lightweight monitoring, and then there’s Checkmk — the kind of tool that says, “You want deep metrics? OK. Here’s everything.” And the Raw Edition gives you all of that without any licensing nonsense or cloud lock-in.
It’s based on Nagios under the hood — but don’t let that scare you. Checkmk adds a real web UI, automated discovery, performance graphs, smart service checks, and better scaling. It turns the old-school Nagios mod
SigNoz: OpenTelemetry-Based Observability Without Giving Up Control Most monitoring stacks either cost a fortune, or they flood you with complexity before you even get your first chart. SigNoz is different. It’s built on OpenTelemetry, doesn’t lock you into a cloud vendor, and gives you full-stack tracing, metrics, and logs — all in one dashboard you host yourself.
If you’ve been juggling Prometheus, Jaeger, Grafana, and Loki just to figure out why an endpoint is slow, SigNoz simplifies that in
Netdata: Real-Time Monitoring That Feels Instant (Because It Is) There’s monitoring, and then there’s Netdata. Most tools show you graphs with a five-minute lag. Netdata shows you what’s happening right now — with per-second granularity, insane levels of detail, and a dashboard that loads before you finish typing the URL.
You don’t need to build a stack. No Prometheus, no Grafana, no agents across five machines just to track CPU. Netdata is one binary, one port, zero friction. It starts showing
Unicornscan: Not Polished, Just Powerful Unicornscan isn’t flashy. It doesn’t have a web UI, there’s no slick config wizard, and good luck finding official support. But for network pros who need to map out huge spaces quickly — or quietly — this odd little scanner still has a role to play. It was built for speed. Real speed. The kind you need when scanning entire subnets or bouncing probes off distant nodes and want answers now — not in an hour. It works by firing off packets asynchronously, wit
Wireshark: When You Need to See *Everything* on the Wire Some tools are optional. Wireshark isn’t. If the problem is buried in a packet — whether it’s a bad TLS handshake, misrouted DNS request, or a rogue broadcast storm — this is the microscope that shows what’s really happening.
It’s a protocol analyzer, packet sniffer, and traffic visualizer all in one. It doesn’t abstract. It decodes. Layer by layer, byte by byte. From Ethernet frame to application payload, it tells the whole story.
There
ntopng CE: Network Traffic Visibility That Just Works (Mostly Out of the Box) ntopng isn’t your average network tool. It’s not just about pings, port scans, or SNMP polling. It gives you actual insight — who’s talking to whom, how much, when, and over what protocol. And it does it in real time, with flow-based stats, active host lists, and deep packet labeling.
The Community Edition (CE) is the free version — and for many small-to-medium setups, it’s more than enough. You get a slick web UI, pe
Nmap + Zenmap: When You Want to See the Network — and Actually Understand It There’s scanning… and then there’s knowing. Nmap has been the go-to tool for mapping networks and probing ports for decades. It’s fast, flexible, scriptable — but also, let’s be honest, not exactly user-friendly at first glance. That’s where Zenmap steps in. Zenmap gives Nmap a face — a visual interface that makes crafting, running, and analyzing scans way less intimidating. Together, they turn raw scanning power into s
AnyDesk: Remote Access That Just Works (Even When Everything Else Doesn’t) Remote desktop tools are everywhere. But few are as lean and responsive as AnyDesk. It’s one of those rare apps that feels snappy even over flaky Wi-Fi or halfway across the world — and that’s exactly what made it a favorite among sysadmins and support teams. It’s cross-platform, installs in seconds, and often works without needing admin rights. No complicated firewall rules, no VPN fuss — just a small binary and a sessio
DWService: Remote Access Without the Headaches (or the Licensing Drama) DWService doesn’t shout. It just connects. No licenses, no complex setup, no installer hoops. It’s a free, open-source tool for remote access that works through any browser — and sometimes, that’s exactly what’s needed. It runs a small agent on the remote machine and lets you control it via a web interface. Doesn’t matter if you’re on Linux, Windows, or even a Pi tucked behind a firewall — if it can reach the internet, you’r
RustDesk: When You Just Need to Connect — Without the Drama Some tools don’t shout. They just quietly get the job done. RustDesk is one of those. It’s not trying to sell you a subscription. It doesn’t funnel your traffic through someone else’s cloud. You download it, run it, type an ID — and you’re in. That’s it. Built in Rust, this remote desktop tool skips the flash and focuses on what matters: speed, control, and staying out of your way. Whether you’re helping a friend or managing a rack-moun
ThinLinc: Remote Linux Desktops That Actually Feel Usable Remote desktop access on Linux has always been a bit of a mess. VNC is clunky, X2Go is fragile, RDP is mostly for Windows… and that’s where ThinLinc steps in. It’s a remote desktop server built specifically for Linux — one that doesn’t feel like an afterthought. With ThinLinc, users can connect to full graphical Linux desktops from anywhere, over the web or a native client. It’s fast, secure, and surprisingly polished — even over slower n
osquery: Ask Your Infrastructure Questions — and Actually Get Answers Most systems hide what they’re doing behind layers of logs, daemons, and config files. osquery flips that. It turns your operating system into a queryable database — one where processes, users, open ports, and even kernel modules become rows in a table. Need to find all running processes with a specific parent? Or all machines where /etc/shadow was modified in the last hour? With osquery, it’s a SELECT statement away.
Security Onion: Full-Spectrum Network Defense Without the Vendor Lock-in Most security stacks feel like a patchwork — bits of open source glued together with commercial glue. Security Onion flips that model on its head. It’s a complete Linux distribution built specifically for network security monitoring, intrusion detection, and log analysis. And the best part? It’s free and open. It’s not just a toolkit. It’s a full environment — preconfigured, tightly integrated, and ready to drop into real-w
ClamWin: The Kind of Antivirus That Doesn’t Get in Your Way Let’s be honest — most antivirus tools these days feel more like sales platforms than security software. Popups, telemetry, cloud sync, “premium” upgrades… it’s a lot. ClamWin doesn’t do any of that. It’s quiet, old-school, and incredibly straightforward. You install it. It scans what you ask it to. That’s basically the deal. No background processes chewing up memory, no pushing subscriptions, no trying to “optimize” your PC without p
Zeek: Not Just Packets — Patterns, Context, and a Ton of Clues There’s a big difference between seeing packets and understanding what they mean. That’s where Zeek comes in. It doesn’t just capture traffic — it breaks it down, slices it up, and hands you a detailed report of what really happened on the wire. It’s not flashy. No popups. No dashboards. Just structured logs that make sense — DNS queries, SSL certificates, weird HTTP headers, broken protocols. All there, line by line.
KVM + Cockpit: The Simple Way to Run VMs Without Going Full Enterprise Here’s the thing — if all you need is a handful of virtual machines running on a Linux box, you don’t need a full-blown virtualization suite. KVM is already there. It’s fast, native, and has been in the kernel for ages. The only problem? It’s not exactly friendly unless you enjoy XML files and virsh commands. That’s where Cockpit steps in. It doesn’t try to be a hypervisor. It’s just a clean web interface that lets you manage
Portainer CE: Docker and Kubernetes Without the Terminal Stress Containers are powerful. But they’re also a pain when you have to manage them all by hand. Portainer CE fixes that. It gives a simple web interface for working with Docker, Docker Swarm, and Kubernetes — no endless YAML, no guessing CLI flags. It doesn’t try to be some all-in-one cloud platform. It’s just enough control, in the right place, at the right time. For people who know what they’re doing but want to save time (and sanity),
Proxmox VE: Virtualization That Gets Out of the Way (and Just Lets You Run Stuff) If you’ve ever used VMware or Hyper-V and felt boxed in — Proxmox VE feels like a breath of fresh air. It’s a full-blown virtualization platform, but without licensing nightmares or closed ecosystems. Based on Debian, with a built-in web interface, Proxmox VE lets you manage virtual machines and containers side by side. No extra agents. No proprietary hypervisors. Just KVM, LXC, and a UI that actually works.
Harvester: Virtualization for People Who’ve Outgrown VMware But Still Need VMs Not every setup is ready for Kubernetes. But also — not everyone wants to stay stuck with legacy hypervisors forever. Harvester sort of lands in the middle. It lets you run virtual machines and containers on bare metal, with built-in storage and networking, and it doesn’t make you beg for licenses or support keys. What’s strange — in a good way — is that it’s Kubernetes under the hood. But you don’t have to care. You